We’d love to hear from you.

What do all these duos have in common? They’re all musical power couples. Each half of the partnership brought strengths to the relationship. Each compensated for the other’s weaknesses. Together, they made beautiful music that their solo stuff couldn’t quite match.

A great customer service platform should be the Lennon to your McCartney. It should amplify your strengths, strengthen your weaknesses, and help you create awesome experiences for your customers.

Cranking out a chart-topping customer experience has never been more vital to your business’ success. Seventy-eight percent of consumers say customer service was a determining factor in their decision to make a repeat purchase. In fact, a recent survey found that 89% of businesses will soon be competing chiefly on customer experience.

The right customer service platform can help empower your employees to provide an exceptional customer experience that makes your company stand out from the pack. Your customer service agents can spend less time fumbling with decades old technology and more time focusing on what matters most: Building lasting relationships with the customer.

Is your customer service platform helping you make beautiful music for your customers? Or are they out of tune with your needs? To make sure your business stays competitive, it’s vital to have the right platform connecting your employees and your customers.

Through the countless conversations we have had with companies putting service at the forefront, we’ve identified four characteristics of a top-notch customer service platform. If yours isn’t hitting all the marks, it may be time to look for an alternative (we’re partial to Gladly).

Four Customer Service Platform Must-Haves

1. It Puts People First

No one enjoys being assigned a case number and having to remember it or input it multiple times across interactions with multiple customer service agents. We hate feeling like a ticket number when we’re the customers. So why would we put our customers through it?

The right customer service platform should be people-based, not case or ticket-based. A people-first platform lets you see your customers as more than a series of isolated contact points. It enables your employees to holistically connect with the customer, with full knowledge of their history and all the other conversations they have had with the company.

2. It’s Omni-Channel

Conversations with customers simply don’t happen through just one channel anymore. Companies are realizing that they need to support multiple communication channels to allow customers to reach them. We have found that 82% of consumers want to use a variety of methods to communicate with customer service, not just phone and email. Answering a complaint on social media can increase your customer advocacy by 2.5x more than phone or email.

For a customer service platform to truly put people first, it needs to maintain a consistent dialog across email, text message, chat, voice calls, even social media like Twitter and Facebook messenger.

3. It’s Easy to Use

Customers expect a quick response from someone who has the information necessary to resolve their issue. Your customer service platform should streamline the process, not slow it down with unnecessary steps. It should eliminate siloed conversations, making it easy to see the entire customer history in one place. By displaying customer information right up front, you’ll be able to give customer service agents more context to help the customer faster and more effectively.

An easy-to-use platform is vital both for your existing and your future employees. When you’re ready to ramp up for your busy season, you should be able to onboard new agents and get them up to speed with a quickness. To make sure your platform is easy to learn and use, look for a platform with an intuitive and familiar interface that takes inspiration from modern apps.

4. It Promotes Collaboration

It takes a team to provide great customer service–and the larger the customer base, the larger the team needs to be.

That’s why team collaboration and enabling productivity is such a vital part of an effective customer service platform. Your platform should have the ability to easily collaborate with other team members, get customers efficiently to the best person to help them, and allow managers to ensure teams are operating effectively.

Choose the Right Partner to Rock Customer Service

Your customer service platform should provide the rhythm and harmony you need to make beautiful music for your customers. In a competitive landscape where customer experience is king, the right platform can help get your business a standing ovation–and leave your customers eager for an encore.